If The UFC Wants To Be Considered A Mainstream, Legitimate Sport

There is something more important than drug testing for The UFC to ever have a chance of becoming a mainstream legitimate sport and that is mandatory title defenses. As it stands now, there is no rule regarding how often a champion must defend his title. A fighter can go a year without a single title defense and then if he says he still needs another 3 months or 4 months to feel like defending his title, The UFC booker just says, "OK, stay home. Defend your title when you're feeling better."

Holding on to a UFC Title should be one of the hardest things to do in all of sports. It would be except that fighters don't have any obligation to defend every 90 days, every 120 days, every 180 days, or even once a year! Any champion can maintain his status as UFC Champion for a whole year when he's allowed to go a whole tear without even one title defense!

In other sports if an athlete or a team of athletes is scheduled to compete and they pull out because they claim they're injured, it's a forfeit! In The UFC there is no punishment for missing a scheduled fight. A true champion should be more than somebody who just happened to defeat the previous champion and went the next 12 or 15 months without fighting. A true champion has the toughness to avoid getting injured on a regular basis, and has the toughness to defend his title whether he feels good or not that night, because of this reason: He gave his word he would defend his title that night!

There needs to be a maximum number of days that a fighter can go without defending his title and still be allowed to keep his title. If he goes even one day longer than the maximum number of days allowed to go without defending, he should be stripped of his title. Being skilled and having the necessary tools to be able to defeat the previous champion is one thing that qualifies someone as a UFC Champion but if he wants to stay UFC Champion he needs to do more. He needs to show that besides being able to take the title from the previous champ, he needs to be tough enough to be willing to go into a fight sick, or with an injury, even if that means he might only be at 80% that night. He needs to be durable to so that he rarely gets anything more than a minor injury. He needs to be smart enough to know how to train hard, yet also train intelligently so as to avoid injuries due to using bad form or because of overtraining.

There's no doubt that this is a problem, and certain fighters exploit it.

There's a clear incentive to stay out of the octagon while concurrently holding onto the belt, and that's to rake in all of the elevated appearance fees that comes with being UFC champion, and don't think the managers/representation of champions don't know this.

Six months should be the absolute limit, and any reason why a title can't be defended during that timeframe (including injuries) should result in a title strip.

UFC is not a sport but a business, the business of selling tickets and airtime to people who want to have a fun time watching two people fight using many different forms of fighting. Who really cares who is the champion?

I would say, if the situation warrants it (injuries or similar) give a maximun of year to defend the belt, with maybe a three month prorrogue if there is a signed contract to defent the belt in this period. If the figther relapses strip him ("The fighter announces that he releases the belt"), automatically, no excuses.